Sociology of Education Midterm Review

Midterm Review from Weeks 2 through 4

Mass Atrocity

• direct violence against a group of people with a widespread use of weapons of mass destruction, resulting in mass deaths or Genocide.

• think WWII, the war ended with over 80 million people dead.

Genocide

• created after World War II after the mass scale of violence. World War II was where weapons of mass destruction were first used causing tons of deaths in a matter of seconds.

Nuremburg Trials

• between 1945 and 1946

• to hold the worst Nazis accountable for their actions

• Crimes against humanity was developed due to the horrors of Nazi Rule

Adolf Eichmann

• Facilitated and managed the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps.

• Was prosecuted in 1961 on Israel

• Sentenced for crimes against Jewish people and crimes against humanity

• executed in 1962

The Final Solution

• policy outlining death squads, deportations, and exterminations of Jewish people in concentration camps.

• Eichmann helped write the outline; claimed his innocence over the fact that he never personally killed or gave an order to kill anyone.

Banality of Evil Development

• developed because of people like Eichmann and the Nazis, or anyone supportive of, or involved in, the Holocaust by sociologists.

• aimed to understand how humans could be organized toward violence and form sociological approaches to mass atrocity.

• coined by Hannah Arendt in her New Yorker article—and later, book—following Eichmann’s trial.

Banality of Evil Definition

• the inability to justify evil actions. the second thought is introduced into the ‘why’ of the topic, frustration occurs because there is literally not justification for the action.

• Evil comes from the failure to think; defying thought.

• Eichmann never realized what he was doing because he had the inability to think from the standpoint of others. He internalized this idea that he was simply a bureaucrat, a pencil pusher.

• He had normal, bureaucratic, daily routine in which he never pulled a trigger or saw blood. This is what makes evil banal, because violence is not just pulling a trigger.

Z. Bauman

• wrote Modernity and the Holocaust (1989)

• developed the sociological approach to the Holocaust that refuted the idea that the event was a deviation or fluke from modern society. He argued that the idea that this was a ‘barbaric’ retreat to premodern society was not correct, and that it is a large part of modern society; banal and waiting.

Bauman’s Three Conditions of Mass Atrocity

1. The violence is authorized by official orders coming from ‘above’ i.e. i was following orders, i didn’t make the decision.

2. Actions are routinized practices and exact specification and division of roles, i.e. i was fulfilling a role, i only okayed ___.

3. Victims of violence are dehumanized by ideological definitions and indoctrination, i.e. i was only protecting myself / my people from the ‘other’.

What does Bauman argue needs to happen for Mass Atrocity to be allowed?

• One or more of the three conditions could be met in order to understand how mass violence happens.

• If you want people to not think—as Arendt claimed—if you want people to do the work; do these things. The third is the most impactful, yet you only need one.

Psychologized to Sociological Shift

• There was a shift from generalized to individualized ideas of people and actions.

• instead of bad people do bad things, its ordinary people can do bad things.

• people who perpetrate violence are monstrous and evil, to people who perpetrate violence can be encouraged to do so under certain social conditions.

• to explain violence, we need to reflect how perpetrators are or the circumstances in which their traumas or upbringings shaped them. social systems can enable violence and the conformity needed to perpetrate it.

Why was education developed?

• to promote critical thinking around why people do the things they do.

• to teach people to seek truth and evidence to think critically and skeptically, and to question power.

• an institutional foundation for teaching empathy, solidarity, universalism, and skepticism.

What contributes to the ideological divisions of war?

• blind nationalism, obedience, and thoughtlessness.

• systems or sources like patriotism, ethnic divisions, ideas used to maintain the positions of people in power, racism, xenophobia, charismatic leadership, media, and bureaucratic structures.

Key Components of Democratic Education

1. enables critical thought and skepticism: the skill of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, or arguments to reach sound conclusions or informed choices. not being opposed or averse to conflict, controversy, or disagreement.

2. fosters deliberative democracy: democracy is a process of citizens deliberating and making decisions through communication in an open forum or public sphere. There are no barriers to communication and there is equal opportunity to participate, free from limitations or interference from the state or the market.

3. encourages active citizenship: being exposed to a range of opinions. value placed on being informed about what is going on in society, taking responsibility for community, and political & social engagement.

4. must be universal and public: equal opportunity and access to education, state-funded and non discriminatory. encourage people to think in terms of humanity and not divided groups.

Jürgen Habermas

• part of Hitler Youth; believed education ought to give people democracy.

• came of age in postwar Germany when people were trying to figure out how so many people could blindly and unthinkingly follow power and rule.

• saw the Nuremberg trials as revealing the moral and political failures of German society and laid groundwork for deliberative democracy.

• believed education and the role of the teacher is among the most virtuous things you can do if the thing you want most of all is for your students to be good thinkers and communicators.

• defined democracy as people having the power to participate in decision making and that majority opinions should be questioned in the same way we question power. this also meant that the minority opinion should always be given a fair platform to be heard from.

Ghodsee

• utopians have long understood that lasting social change requires an investment in education.

• utopias saw visions of education becoming more available to the public.

• spoke on an educational strategy that encouraged a less hierarchical society by educating people in both manual labour and more traditional academic disciplines.

• spoke on the devastation tax-cuts have on quality of education.

What major ideals were included in Ghodsee’s reading?

1. alleviating the burden on parents to educate their own children is important.

2. making education pleasurable rather than a forced activity is beneficial.

3. honouring the experiences and knowledge that young people have and giving them a sense of responsibility and self-reliance is pivotal for critical development.

What was the tension that Ghodsee discussed regarding how education is valued and defined?

education as a way of reproducing privilege verses education as a vehicle for liberating people and getting them to think critically.

What is the Sociology of Education?

• examines the interplay between education and social structures, and how this impacts peoples experiences in school.

• different from education psychology by focusing on external factors influencing learning, including family background, race, access to resources, and social class.

What are the three components to the sociology of education?

1. structure: a connection between what happens inside schools and the larger social forces like capitalism, social structure, family, labour / work, gender, race, class, etc.

2. culture: modern societies have developed powerful cultural ideologies that suggest that education is a legitimate method for sorting people into the positions that they have earned or deserve.

3. socialization: schools are primary socialization agents. this is a deliberate process by which societies transmit knowledge, values, and norms to prepare young people for adult roles. in this way, schools reproduce societal inequalities.

What does the sociology of education analyze?

• culture

• social origins (family, status)

• social mobility

• educational attainment

• occupational status or attainment

• ascribed status (fixed, given)

• achieved status (changing, earned)

• meritocracy (government)

What is the functionalist approach to education?

• suggests that education is a vital part of social cohesion and social order, and thus education plays a function in society.

• formal education provides skills training and capacity training, which are necessary for highly skilled jobs.

• as these jobs become more diverse, more and varied forms of education are needed.

• educational requirements are constantly changing and evolving.

What is social stratification?

• a society’s organization of its people into hierarchies and rankings based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and access to education.

• a mere reflection of where people are naturally inclined to land in the hierarchy based on their work and talent.

What is social mobility?

• the movement of individuals, families, or groups through a system of social hierarchy or stratification.

• upward social mobility stems through hard work and talent, downward mobility then reflects a lack of these.

What is the functionalist view on stratification?

• different jobs require different skills

• there are a fixed set of positions in society, each position of the labour force functions to satisfy certain requirements

• positions have to be filled by people who have the talent or training to fulfil that role, meaning higher paid work reflects the successful acquisition of greater skills. think custodians and judges, the custodian would be seen as objectively less talented than the judge, and therefore deserves less pay.

• society is composed of different positions that get different rewards.

What is the functionalist view of education?

• education is for training and acquiring skills, training then fills demand created by occupation structure,

• educational attainment and occupational structure then function in harmony.

• the effect of schooling is that more people are educated, and education is good because it fills the needs of society.

What is the conflict approach to education?

• considers the link between social origins and achievement, educationally and occupationally.

• also considered the Neo-Marxist approach.

• suggests that social life is characterized by the continual struggle for advantage and control over scarce resources (wealth, power, prestige.)

• schools are institutions in which this struggle takes place.

What is the conflict theorists view of stratification?

• education is about the struggle over power and its maintenance

• hierarchies that divide people are justified by schooling practices,

• schools provide training for elite culture, or a respect for it and a legitimation of it,

• employers / elite use education to select persons who have been socialized into dominant status groups.

• employers / elite use schools as a means of selection for cultural attributes

What are weaknesses of the functionalist theory?

• cannot account for the link between social origins and achievement,

• based on the notion of the continual progress of society, ascribed status is viewed as rasidual, soon to be outdated,

• based on the notion that education plays the role of selecting those most suited to the jobs throughout the occupational structure,

• very little ability to account for inequality and why some positions are dominated by certain groups and not by others.

What are status groups?

• a group of people within a society who are differentiated by qualities such as lifestyle, prestige, occupation, ethnicity, race, and religion.

• derived from sharing common cultures such as languages, tastes or trends, manners, rituals, beliefs, opinions, and values.

• give people a sense of identity, which forms insiders and outsiders. the status group is often closed, with privileges available to only those in the group and denied to those outside it.

The Richest Canadians vs the Poorest Canadians

• the richest 20% own 67.7% of the country’s total wealth in 2023; averaging $3.3 million per household.

• the bottom 40% of households held only 2.7% of total wealth; averaging $67 038 per household.

• eurocentrism, white privilege, and patriarchal systems, often lead to power of historically privileged groups, likely impacting the 20% positively and the 40% negatively.

How do schools teach and legitamize status cultures?

• new members of elite are often selected from their own status group; lower positions are those who accept their subordinate status.

• the powerful quality of schooling is that it justifies social hierarchies and organizes them as normal and inevitable.

• this is done through grading, reward systems, behavioural issues, report card and evolution components that assess academic standing but also demeanour, meritocracy (school councils), and explicit & hidden curriculum.

• educational and occupational attainment then rely on intersections of social originality,

Summarize Conflict Theory

• rewards follow from an intersection between social origin and educational and job attainment.

Summarize Functionalist Theory

• rewards follow from effort and ability. working class’ were yet to fully embrace modern values, and still do not truly value education, aspire for upward mobility, and embrace the spirit of competition.

What is the concept of cultural capital?

• some students come from privileged backgrounds that prepare them with certain characteristics, knowledge, and dispositions that are highly valued in school.

• schools value and reward the knowledge, characteristics, and behaviours of the upper class the most.

• students from working class background possess knowledge and characteristics that are not valued and therefore, their success in school is limited.

• working class students acquire the highly valued characteristics and skills of the upper classes but they will never have a natural ease and familiarity with them like the upper classes do.

Bourdieu’s Approach to Social Reproduction

• Education as the institutional foundation for sociology of symbolic power: the non-violent ability to shape reality by influencing people’s perceptions, self-perceptions, and beliefs about how the social world works. It is the power to make people accept their own and other people’s place in social hierarchies as natural and legitimate.

• gives us language to describe complex moments.

• a sight of reproduction of inequality and the accumulation and legitimation of cultural capital.

Bourdieu Pipeline

• Class position (ascribed status like race or class) then enter school, school then legitimates high status culture (cultural capital), then social reproduction occurs (class divisions maintained), ending with power being maintained and respected as justified.

What is symbolic power?

• the non-violent ability to shape reality by influencing people’s perceptions, self-perceptions, and beliefs about how the social world works.

• it is a type of power to be able to make people accept their own and others place in social hierarchies as natural and legitimate.

What is social reproduction?

• the process by which society maintains an enduring character from generation to generation.

What are the two characteristics of social reproduction?

1. set of tasks and processes by which a society reproduces and maintains its population and workforces, i.e. children attending school

2. set of processes by which social class divisions are maintained and stratification is reproduced across generations

i.e. class is linked to culture is linked to reproduction.

Culture as a factor in social reproduction

• a major factor in social reproduction

• key to understanding how people are divided and how success and failure work.

• schooling expands educational opportunity, yet class-based stratification in education is maintained and justified.

• education maintains inequality by rewarding certain inherited cultural differences, leading some to education achievement, respect, power, privilege, status, rewards, etc. and others not.

Bourdieu’s definition of class

• not only indicated by one’s economic position but also by the volume and composition of economic, cultural, and social capital.

• evident through habitus

• comes from the way we are socialized by our families; natural way of being in the world which is shaped by how you are socialized and what forms of capital you have access too.

What is Habitus?

• the natural dispositions, lifestyle, tastes, etc. that most often come from one’s socialisation in families.

• felt as ease in specific social contexts, as a natural and comfortable state, because it is rooted in our inheritance and socialisation.

Bourdieu’s definition of Culture

• the accumulated store of symbols, ideas, material objects, and practices associated with social life.

• culture is tied to relations of power; there are struggles over culture to both change and preserve it, therefore looking at how certain norms, values, and beliefs are justified or challenged.

• knowing what is expected and valued in certain social settings and having the habitus and cultural capital necessary to belong.

Bourdieu’s opinion of schools

• Institutions in which the production, transmission, and accumulation of valued forms of capital takes place.

• legitimate the statues culture of the elite / the wealthy / the dominant group.

Reproduction of culture

• involves both consecrating high status culture for those who have it and consecrating it for those who don’t or who grow to respect it through schooling.

Reproduction of Social Class Relations

• enables the conservation of material distribution of resources.

• the symbolic power that schools hold.

Bourdieu Central Findings

• schools are sites of symbolic power (the exercise of non-physical domination and legitimation of a person’s placement in social hierarchies) done via capital.

• schools are effective sites in which to study how people come to believe that they deserve to occupy their particular position in society; i.e. their position is right, fair, or just.

• schools are sites for social reproduction

What is cultural capital?

• knowledge of and familiarity with the tastes and preferences of the elite, wealthy, and dominate classes.

• signifies high status; behaviours, knowledge, values, tastes, possessions, and preferences that indicate ruling or upper-class status.

• is objectified (material objects), embodied (competencies, dispositions, habitus), and institutionalised (academic qualifications).

• can be exchanged for opportunities and rewards, occupations with high status and income (economic capital), access to networks (social capital).

How it cultural capital like money?

• different kinds of assets that can be mobilized and put to use; different currencies are relevant in different contexts.

• can be acquired, exchanged, and converted into value and reward.

• social classes differ in the forms of capital they have and use.

• distribution of capital reflects the unequal structure of the social world.

How does Bourdieu used Cultural Capital?

• employs the term to understand how society is reproduced and how the dominant retains their position (not solely an economic question and status is not just about money)

Bourdieu on Habitus

• differences in habitus give individuals varying cultural skills, social connections, educational practices, and other cultural resources, which then can be translated into different forms of value (i.e. capital) as individuals move out into the world.

• parents transmitted different habitus in the home, this habitus, in specific institutional encounters, functioned as a form of cultural capital. Depending on how it was activated, the culture capital yielded or didn’t yielded an educational profit.

• different social spaces or fields require and reward different kinds of capital.

What three way is cultural capital institutionalized in schools?

1. schools are a site of social reproduction.

2. schools themselves have capital.

3. .schools reward cultural capital via evaluation and curricular processes

How schools are a site of social reproduction?

• schools favour those already ‘rich’ in cultural capital through academic rewards and achievements. By rewarding cultural capital, schools grant legitimacy and authority (sacred qualities) to high status symbols and capacities, consecrating it for those who don’t have it.

• low-status cultural forms are sanctioned, rendered illegitimate, profane, and ill-equipped for scholastic requirements.

How do schools have capital?

• prestige of institutions vary in terms of selectivity (who attends), nature of recruitment, kind of education they provide (leadership vs vocational or technical training), networks they provide access to, range of career possibilities for graduates (alumni profile pages), etc.

• Institutions carry different compositions of capital, some toward accumulation of economic capital (business and state), some toward cultural capital (scientific, intellectual, or creative).

How do schools reward cultural capital via evaluation and curricular processes?

• different disciplines attract different ‘types’ of people, i.e. which disciplines might attract those with high levels of cultural capital? Curriculum content and style gives advantage to those who have linguistic capital and language that reflects cultured disposition, like literary linguistic styles. Style of assignments and tests, linguistic expression, vocabulary, as well as mastery of subject matter spoken and written in eloquence.

Bourdieu’s Punchline

• while school success is officially seen to result from one’s academic ability, it actually reflects schools’ biased evaluations of cultural competence.

• simple differences in students’ class cultures get misrecognised as differences in native intelligence. Schools portray inequalities as unfortunate by-products of neutral academic standards, while Bourdieu traces them to invisible cultural biases that limit working-class success.

What did Lareau say were powerful effects of cultural capital?

• it lets people know what are highly valued activities and habits.

• it is a window into one’s status and privilege.

• it calls into question the idea that people earn their place in social hierarchies.